Shakespeare’s Tragic Art

""A New Yorker Best Book We've Read This Year"" ""This engaging study . . . finds common threads in the plays’ inner workings, most notably a delicate, calculated interplay between plot and personality."" * New Yorker * ""Ambitious and intriguing. . . . An erudite and scholarly exploration of the Bard’s work."" * Kirkus Reviews * ""Lewis makes a powerful case for Shakespeare’s unique, many-faceted tragic worldview, and his book is a compelling piece of literary criticism. What’s more, it sent me rushing straight back to my Complete Shakespeare, with a burning desire to enter its glittering, vast worlds anew""---Philip Womack, The Spectator World ""Taking on an analysis of what Shakespeare was attempting to achieve with his run of 10 tragedies requires not just a knowledge of the plays and the theories and speculations of all those critics and commentators who went before but also a robust hypothesis that brings something new to the table. Rhodri Lewis. . .manages to pull off this herculean task with some aplomb. . . . This book is a must for anyone interested in studying Shakespeare in any depth.""---Terry Potter,, The Letterpress Project ""Shakespeare’s Tragic Art is an important addition to the literature about Shakespearean tragedy and essential reading for those interested in the subject. It is more than that, however – it offers an insight into a way of understanding those mysteries of human existence that Shakespeare had some understanding of and passed on to us through his tragic dramas.""---Ralph Goldswain, No Sweat Shakespeare ""The best volume on the Bard I have read since Emma Smith’s This Is Shakespeare. . . . A valuable critical work that sees the Bard as a 'temperamental skepticist' whose mission is more diagnostic than it is didactic: this Shakespeare is of particular use in our current addiction to the blind alleys of dogma.""---Bill Marx, Arts Fuse ""Provocative, stimulating . . . Lewis ends by commending the freedom of interpretation that Shakespeare allows us, a freedom that entails a willingness to be open to his disturbance of our unthinking complacency.""---Paul Dean, New Criterion ""While keeping one foot firmly in historicism, [Lewis] also connects the tragedies to the modern sensibility that understands the human individual as observer and observed, both subject and object of the constructions of art. . . . Heidegger’s Weltbild here rubs shoulders with the Renaissance’s heritage of verba (words) and res (things). The resulting analysis is sharp, engaging, and surprisingly readable."" * Choice Reviews * ""An impressive display of scholarship. . . .[Lewis’s] targets are the ideas to which these characters adhere and the delusion that they can be authors of their own destinies. In the confinement of his characters, we recognise our own confinement too.""---Adrian Poole, Literary Review